It was a noble spectacle to behold a young Queen, at a time when scarce a monarch in Europe was secure on his throne, setting out with her illustrious consort and family to make a royal progress through her dominions, and selecting for the first place of her visit the island which had so recently raised the standard of rebellion against her government, and for the next the city which had first in the empire responded to the cry of treason raised in Paris, on the overthrow of the throne of Louis Philippe. Nor has the result failed to correspond, even more happily than could have been hoped, to the gallant undertaking. If it be true, as is commonly reported, that our gracious sovereign said, "She went to Ireland to _make_ friends, but to the Land of Cakes to _find_ them," she must by this time have been convinced that the generous design has, in both islands, proved successful beyond what her most enthusiastic friends could have dared to hope. Who could have recognised, in the multitudes which thronged to witness her passage through Cork, Dublin, and Belfast, and the universal acclamations with which she was everywhere received by all classes of her subjects, the chief cities of an island long torn by civil dissension, and which had only a year before broken out into actual rebellion against her government? Who could have recognised in the youthful sovereign visiting the public buildings of Dublin, like a private peeress, without any of the state of a Sovereign, and chiefly interested with her royal consort in the institutions devoted to beneficence, the Head of a Government whom _The Nation_ had so long represented as callous to all the sufferings of the people? And during the magnificent spectacle of the royal progress through Glasgow, where five hundred thousand persons were assembled from that great city, and the neighbouring counties, to see their Queen--and she passed for three miles through stately structures, loaded with loyalty, under an almost continued archway of flags, amidst incessant and deafening cheers--who could have believed he was in a city in which democratic revolt had actually broken out only eighteen months before, and the walls had all been placarded, on the day when London was menaced, with treasonable proclamations, calling on the people to rise in their thousands and tens of thousands against the throne? And how blessed the contrast to the condition of Scotland when her _last Queen_ had been in that neighbourhood, and the towers of Glasgow cathedral looked down on Morton issuing from the then diminutive borough, to assail, in the immediate vicinity at Langside, the royal army headed by Mary, and drive her to exile, captivity, and death.[34]